What Makes A Perfect "10"?
Do The Math
By Malcome W. Brown The New York Times
Contributed by Jodie Miller
October 20, 1998
Good news from England: Statistical criteria may make it easier for a man
with stunted perceptual ability to decide whether a woman is sexually
attractive, unattractive or just so-so.
This breakthrough in sexiness assessment was reported in a renowned
British journal, The Lancet, in two papers by Dr. Martin J. Tovée, a
psychologist, and his colleagues at Newcastle University. The gist of the
two reports, one published in November and the other in August, was that
sexual attractiveness in women was a function of body weight compared with
height.
Naturally, working this out requires some arithmetic. The sexiness
quotient proposed by the Newcastle group, called the body-mass index, is
calculated by measuring a woman's weight in kilograms and dividing it by
the square of her height in meters. Got that?
For Americans, this means we must divide a woman's weight in pounds by
2.205 to get the kilograms, and multiply her height in inches times 0.0254
to get the meters. Then we multiply that number times itself and divide
the result into the weight.
Simplicity itself.
After culling various journals (including Playboy, which the authors cited
as "a source which has been used by previous researchers and which is
judged reliable"), they compiled a table of average body-mass indices as
follows: fashion models, 17.57; other models (including centerfolds),
18.09; anorexic women, 14.72; bulimic women, 23.66; normal women, 21.86.
Investigators in the past had theorized that feminine attractiveness was
best gauged by a woman's hip-to-waist ratio, on the grounds that a nice
big ratio supposedly signaled fecundity, a quality these scientists
equated with sexual attraction.
But the Newcastle team tested this hypothesis and found it wanting.
Forty male undergraduates at the university served as a panel rating the
sexiness of full frontal color pictures of 50 naked women of assorted
shapes and sizes, depicted without faces. A graph representing the
students' rankings was compared with graphs of the women's body-mass
indices and with their waist-hip ratios, and it was found that the
students' perceptions matched the body-mass ratios much more closely than
the waist-hip ratios.
Science marches on.
Not to be outdone, the University of Liverpool reported that women who
need anthropometric help in picking sexy mates should look above the belt,
at their prospects' hands. This conclusion, reported by the magazine New
Scientist, came from a study by Dr. John Manning and his associates, who
focused on male patients in a fertility clinic.
It turned out, he reported, that the men with the lowest sperm counts and
poorest sperm motility also had the least symmetrical hands. Dr. Manning's
group also discovered that men whose ring fingers were longer than their
index fingers often had elevated levels of testosterone, and we all know
what that means.
Despite the scorn that has been heaped on "anthropometrics" by Dr. Stephen
Jay Gould (author of "The Mismeasure of Man") and scores of other leading
scientists, the urge to learn about people by measuring them seems to be a
deep-seated human impulse. From the phrenologists of the 19th century to
the heat-sensitive "mood rings" of the 1960's, measurement systems
fascinate and entertain even skeptics.
But while anthropometric systems are harmless fun for some, they have also
kindled bitter disputes.
Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a pioneer in the field
of measuring people. Sir Francis might have avoided intense criticism if
he had restricted his studies to sexual attractiveness, but he took a
different line, seeking to measure intelligence. Having concluded that
intelligence was a hereditary trait and that the breeding of stupid people
should be discouraged, Sir Francis threw the fat into a sociological fire
that still blazes intensely.
Despite the bad name anthropometric systems have in some circles, they are
sometimes useful to forensic scientists.
Alphonse Bertillon, a 19th-century French anthropometrist, devised a
system of forensic identification based on the dimensions of parts of a
body, especially the head, left arm and left foot. His method impressed
Arthur Conan Doyle so much that in "The Hound of the Baskervilles,"
Sherlock Holmes exhibited jealousy of the famous French scientist.
Although most of Bertillon's techniques eventually proved unreliable, the
field of forensic anthropology that developed from his ideas still
thrives, with varying degrees of success. Still, even the modern version
can yield false conclusions.
Among the body parts found in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing
was a leg whose owner could not be identified. Forensic anthropologists
measured and studied the leg and finally concluded it was probably the leg
of a white man. But another and more reliable method was available: DNA
analysis. To the embarrassment of the anthropometrists, DNA showed that
the leg probably came from a black woman.
So, dear reader, if your body-mass index or finger-length ratio is less
than ideal, do not despair. Anthropometrists have been known to err.
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